One minute, you’re cruising down the street to your next destination. The next, your car seizes or starts smoking, leaving you stranded on the side of the road.
An overheated engine is not only inconvenient, but also costly and potentially dangerous. Left unchecked, problems with your cooling system can cause other parts of your engine to warp or even melt, leading to costly repairs, an accident, or both. Keep your cooling system stable by paying attention to your radiator, coolant, and other essential components.
Your car’s cooling system distributes heat evenly throughout the engine, preventing overheating and keeping your car on the road. You need to keep an eye on your coolant or antifreeze levels and change both regularly. These additional tips will help keep your cooling system running smoothly.
Tips For Keeping Your Coolant System Running Smoothly
Top Off Your Coolant
When your car overheats, the first thing you should check is your coolant level. Low coolant levels are one of the main causes of engines overheating. If your coolant levels are low, add the correct coolant for your car to the reservoir. You can either use a diluted coolant or use a 50/50 mix of coolant and distilled water. Add the mixture until it hits the cold fill line and replace and tighten the cap.
Checking your levels and keeping your coolant topped off is a great way to stay on the road during the hottest summer months.
Tighten the Radiator Cap
Your radiator cap’s most obvious purpose is to keep antifreeze from leaking, but it also maintains and stabilizes pressure throughout the system. Regularly checking your radiator cap will tell you if it has slipped or if it isn’t secure. The radiator cap gets hot when your engine is running, so let your engine cool off completely before testing your cap and stand back a little when you remove it. Since a radiator cap maintains the pressure within your cooling system, expect some exhaust.
Regularly checking your radiator cap to make sure it’s tight is one way to catch a potential problem before it gets out of hand. If you notice it’s slipping, you can investigate whether the problem is coming from the cap or other components in your cooling system and fix it before it causes your car to overheat.
Flush Your Radiator
Radiator flushes are part of any routine maintenance plan. You should flush and refill your system at regular intervals. It’s common to flush and fill a radiator every 30,000 miles or five years (whichever comes first), but consult the manual to see what’s recommended for your car.
Regular coolant changes will keep your coolant from becoming too acidic. Over time, the pH level of your coolant changes, which can lead to corrosion. As the coolant becomes more acidic, it can eat away at the components within your system, like the bearings or your water pump. Flushing and filling your coolant will keep your cooling system clean and running well. You can flush your radiator at home, but make sure you keep your pets out of the garage; antifreeze in deadly to pets, but they are attracted to its taste.
Clean Your Radiator
Whenever you have your car serviced, or if you do it at home, make sure your radiator is free of dirt and debris. If your radiator gets too dirty, it can clog, potentially causing your car to overheat.
Parts of the Cooling System
The tips above cover the basics of cooling system maintenance. But general familiarity with the cooling system and its components can help you diagnose problems when they arise and fix them properly the first time.
Coolant
Coolant is a liquid mixture of water and chemicals that helps regulate your engine’s temperature. The coolant component lowers your engine’s temperature in hot weather, and the antifreeze properties keep the water in the mixture from freezing during the winter. Usually, coolant should be changed every 30,000 miles, but you should consult your owner’s manual for a figure appropriate for your vehicle.
Water Pump
Your water pump is an important part of your cooling system. It pumps coolant throughout the engine, preventing your car from overheating as you drive. Your water pump is typically controlled by a belt, either a drive belt or a timing belt depending on your engine. Some newer model engines use electronically controlled water pumps.
Radiator and Coolant
The radiator is the core component of your cooling system. It houses coolant and distributes it throughout the engine to control the temperature. It works by passing coolant through metal fins, allowing heat to flow from engine components to the outside of your car. Your radiator is controlled by a thermostat, which opens and closes the radiator depending on the temperature. You can locate your radiator behind your front grill.
Cooling Fan
Cooling fans help rotate air over your radiator when your car isn’t moving or when the temperature is too hot. They can be electric or mechanical and are controlled by a sensor that runs the fan depending on coolant levels.
Engine
While your engine isn’t part of the cooling system itself, it does have coolant flowing through it at various entrance and exit points. A few hoses carry coolant across the engine. If something is wrong with your coolant system and the other components listed here are functioning correctly, check these hoses.
Transmission Cooler
The transmission cooler is different than the rest of the cooling system, but its job is just as important. Your transmission cooler also needs to be flushed and refilled on occasion to keep the transmission functioning correctly.
Sensors
Another small but crucial part of your cooling system, sensors keep your system running. One sensor monitors temperature and the other monitors the coolant level. When your sensors malfunction, your cooling system can’t function correctly, putting you at risk of overheating.
What to Know About Your Cooling System
In modern engines, most cooling systems are similar. Your hose configurations will likely differ depending on the make and model of your car, but all of the components are essentially the same. Classic cars featuring air cooled engines had cooling fins built into the engine block. If you’re working on a classic car, refer to your owner’s manual or a specialist to figure out which component of your cooling system may not be functioning properly.
Common Causes of System Failure
Most cooling system failures are caused by improper coolant levels. If your car is older or has a lot of miles on it, regular wear and tear or inadequate maintenance can cause coolant to leak. If you’ve been involved in a car accident or if your engine was damaged in any way, your coolant can also leak. Old, worn hoses are another common cause of coolant leaks. Check these components of your coolant system regularly to keep your system running well.
If you do have a leak, check all of your hoses and gaskets. A warped or broken gasket could be causing coolant to be vaporized by other parts of your combustion system, wasting it. Regularly checking your coolant levels will tell you if your coolant is likely leaking so you can top off your coolant and diagnose where the leak is coming from.
Other Causes of Cooling System Failure
Circulation problems can cause your cooling system to fail. These usually happen when your water pump breaks or when your cooling passages get blocked. A stuck or broken thermostat can cause cooling system failure by not properly regulating coolant flow to adjust for temperature changes.
What to Look for
If you’re checking your coolant levels when you do routine maintenance and flushing your system regularly, you should be able to detect problems before they arise. But there are other clues that can tell you when your system might be in the early stages of failure.
The first indicator is your car’s temperature gauge. When you’re driving, pay attention. If you notice the gauge moving up abnormally or venturing toward the red zone, check out your cooling system.
If your car smells sweet while you’re driving, or if you notice antifreeze drips around your normal parking spot, you likely have a coolant leak. When you notice the problem, immediately check your coolant levels. If they are too low, it could cause your car to overheat while you’re driving. Top off the coolant and then try to figure out why it’s leaking.
During routine maintenance, keep an eye on your hoses. If your cooling hoses look large or swollen, they could be cracking. Replace them to keep your cooling system running properly.
What to Do If You Have a Cooling System Failure
Once you’ve become familiar with your cooling system and its components, you can start to diagnose where the system might be failing. It’s not necessary to replace the whole cooling system; just start with the malfunctioning parts and see if it fixes the problem.
If everything in your cooling system seems to be intact, check your belts. When your timing belt breaks, it impacts many major engine systems, including your cooling system. For most cars, your drive belt or your timing belt controls the water pump. Replacing these belts before they fail keeps your car and its cooling system running properly.
If your car overheats, you should replace the thermostat. Your car’s thermostat has wax inside which helps it function correctly. When your car overheats, it usually melts the wax in the thermostat, which keeps it from working properly in the future.
Why You Should Promptly Fix Your Cooling System
It can be tempting to ignore a problem with your cooling system, particularly if it’s something minor like a small leak. You might think that you can simply test the coolant levels and replenish your coolant when you need to, but doing so can lead to problems down the road.
A small coolant leak points to a weakness in your car’s cooling system. Even if you diligently test and replace coolant levels, it will likely get bigger. Your combustion system generates a lot of heat as it works, and hot weather makes your engine even hotter. Driving around with a small leak will inevitably lead to a bigger one.
Not fixing your cooling system quickly can also lead to irreparable engine damage. When your car overheats, parts of your engine can start cracking and warping. If the oil in your engine gets too hot, it can become less lubricating and cause your engine to seize. Once this happens, your car can potentially become undrivable, or you might find yourself rebuilding your engine from scratch.
If you do find yourself overheating on the road, pull over and run the heater. This allows your engine to reroute heat from the engine into the car’s interior and can cool the engine enough to keep major damage from setting in.
Have your car towed back to your garage or to the mechanic where you can start to diagnose your problem.
Fix It Yourself
Regular maintenance and close attention to your car’s engine helps minimize the potentially costly damage that comes when your car overheats. If you do your own routine maintenance, add this to your list of routine repairs. Get used to checking coolant levels, cleaning the outside of your radiator for debris, monitoring your hoses, and flushing and filling your radiator at regular intervals recommended by your owner’s manual. A little routine effort can keep you on the road rather than the shoulder.
Final Thoughts
Taking care of your cooling system is an easy way to keep your engine from overheating. Capri Tools has a wide range of tools you can use to loosen gaskets, repair different cooling parts, and flush and fill your own radiator. Visit our store today to find car tools you can use to complete cooling system repairs and other maintenance on your car.